Prophesying a trillion-dollar market that will help businesses do what was previously impossible, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is turning the enterprise-software industry upside-down with the launch of an intelligent, proactive, and limitless digital workforce centered on agents but soon extending to robots.
Called Agentforce 2.0: The Digital Labor Platform, this bold and riveting new offering from Salesforce will, I believe, trigger powerful reverberations across the software industry while also helping customers significantly scale their plans for growth and innovation. In a moment, I’ll offer some ideas on the impact this AI-driven digital workforce will have for customers, and then some thoughts on the repercussions for the software industry. But first, some insights into Benioff’s vision, which in recent weeks has catapulted the market cap of Salesforce by somewhere in the range of $50 billion.
Benioff’s Vision
At the Salesforce 2.0 launch event in San Francisco, Benioff said the customers have rapidly moved far beyond pilots and sandboxes, with Salesforce now having “thousands of customers working with thousands of agents that work with thousands of humans.”
Benioff described the stunning impact Agentforce is having on Salesforce’s own support line —help.salesforce.com — which he said handles about 32,000 calls per week. Of those 32,000, about 10,000 have to be escalated to humans. But since Agentforce went live on help.salesforce.com, the number of weekly escalations to humans has dropped from 10,000 to 5,000, with 83% of those being handled successfully by the agents.
“That’s pretty amazing,” Benioff said. “And it’s made me think about what I do as a CEO in an entirely new way because I’m not just managing human beings — I’m also managing agents, an entirely new type of digital labor. We’ve now got this agentic layer around our workforce, and it’s not a fantasy — it’s what is happening right now.”
So how big might this opportunity be, Benioff wondered. Well, he said, Slack has a TAM of about $100 billion, and CRM’s TAM is about $200 billion — but how, he asked, do you size a totally new market like digital labor?
That’s tricky, Benioff said, because while agents are the first wave of digital labor, the next will be robots, which he said are simply physical manifestations of agents.
“This morning, I took a Waymo to get here — and that’s digital labor — there was nobody in the front seat. And we’re starting to see more and more of this where robots are the physical manifestations of agents,” he said, referring to robots as “a very big and important new type of UI.”
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“But we have now, in a very short time, crossed this bridge to a world of digital labor, which is crazy because I’m not sure that when we started that we even knew where we were going.
“So I think this TAM for digital labor is not just in the billions but in the trillions — it’s an incredible new opportunity for all of us.
The Impact on Customers
For customers, I believe Agentforce 2.0 — and since 1.0 was released only a couple of months ago, how far off can 3.0 be? — will spur CEOs and other leaders to:
- Re-imagine their missions, their mindsets, their ambitions, and their opportunities in a world where labor is no longer constrained but rather intelligent and boundless (and *never* goes on vacation);
- Accelerate their data-optimization strategies to be able to exploit the full value and potential of agents;
- Shift their concepts of time, speed, and opportunity; and
- Make the creation of an AI-first culture an absolute top priority.
The Impact on the Software Industry
Benioff’s vision for AI agents will, I believe, trigger profound changes across the software industry:
- Recast enterprise applications as data factories rather than as end-products in themselves;
- Accelerate the evolution of “data clouds” among every Cloud Wars Top 10 company;
- Intensify the ascendance of low-code and no-code technologies as customers will be building tens of thousands and quickly hundreds of thousands and, not so far in the future, millions of these digital-labor agents; and
- Draw unmistakably and increasingly sharp distinctions between copilots — which are excellent tools for a huge range of uses — and agents, which will become ubiquitous in a dizzyingly short period of time.
Final Thought
Every company in the Cloud Wars Top 10 has an agent strategy, and many of them are compelling. But by moving rapidly — incredibly rapidly — from concept to wide-scale deployment of agents in companies across industries and across the globe, Salesforce has become in my estimation the unquestioned leader in AI agents and Benioff’s vision for a digital workforce.
And if Benioff is to be believed — and I certainly believe him — Agentforce is not about obliterating jobs to boost profits, but rather about providing skilled labor to drive growth.
“To unlock GDP growth, we need a breakthrough technology,” he said in his presentation.
“And digital labor is the new horizon for business.”
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